Imagine you were at a restaurant having your wonderful lunch. All of a sudden, the stranger sitting nearby asked you to pass him the black pepper. He said:
‘Pass me the pepper.’
Maybe you were not willing to help him because it sounded quite rude and impolite, didn’t it?
The example sentence above is what we call ‘Imperative Mood’ in English, which is something we are going to talk about in this post.
First, what is ‘Mood’ in English? To make it simple, it refers to the positioning of Subjects and Verbs in a sentence. We usually position verbs differently to achieve certain speech or communicative functions. Imperative Mood is one of the structures which we use to give order, instructions, warnings, suggestions, etc. by removing the Subject and placing the Verb at the beginning of the sentence. Take this as a general rule as it is not always the case.
There are 3 forms of imperatives:
1️⃣ Positives: Call the police.
2️⃣ Negatives: Do not call the police. / Don’t call the police. / Never call the police.
3️⃣Persuasive: Let us call the police.
We can use either a full stop or an exclamation mark (!) at the end of the sentence.
We can use Imperative Mood to achieve different speech / communicative functions. Have a look at the following picture.
🔥🔥🔥Challenging Corner 🔥🔥🔥
💎 As mentioned before, Imperative Mood features removing the Subject and placing the Verb at the beginning of the sentence. However, it may not always be the case:
➡️Sometimes we add the word ‘please’ to make the request sound more polite. E.g. ‘Please call the police.’
➡️Sometimes we add Personal Pronouns to give stronger and more decisive order. E.g. ‘You call the police.’
➡️Sometimes we add a Helping Verb ‘do’ to give emphasis. E.g. ‘Do call the police.’
💎 We can also use Imperative Mood together with Question Tags to ask for agreement:
➡️Call the police, won’t you?
➡️Pass me the pepper, will you?
💎 We can also use Imperative Mood together with Conditionals to give instructions when certain situations occur:
➡️Call the police if you witness an accident.
➡️Call the police unless you are not on the scene.
➡️Pass him the papper in case he needs it.